The new ship which is the pride of the Cuban nation is a bit unusual in that it is made up of 10,000 inner tubes all tied together with twine. Its method of propulsion is the legs of the passengers who move in perfectly disciplined synchronization to the sound of a salsa band in order to get from point A to point B.

The last place on God’s green earth–the ABSOLUTE last place–that you’d expect to find a viewpoint on Cuba other than “Castro/Che good, U.S. bad” would be a college newspaper, especially that of a liberal Massachusetts college.

So I hope you’ll excuse my utter shock when I discovered this morning not one, but two–TWO–Massachusetts college newspapers presenting the truth about Cuba.

Critics have blasted the film for presenting a misleading view of pre-revolutionary Cuba.

After the screening, Garcia told The Crimson that those critics were misinformed.

â€œWhen you make a movie about a political open wound, people will come at you with a political agenda,â€ Garcia said. â€œIf a French filmmaker had made this movie, you would not have heard the same things. But I am a Cuban exile.â€

Richard A. Serna â€™10, vice president of the Latino Menâ€™s Collective, which helped organize the event with the Harvard Cuban American Undergraduate Student Association (CAUSA), said Garcia brought a different perspective to the debate over Cuba.

â€œGarcia is someone who is trying to tell a story that hasnâ€™t been told,â€ he said.

Indeed he is. Next, from the University of Massachusetts’ Daily Collegian, we get an editorial–by a student, Ben Duffy, whose name suggests he is not of Cuban descent–titled Guevara: fiend, not folk hero:

Washington’s 45-year-old embargo has cost Cuba more than $89 billion to date, wreaking havoc on everything from primary education to pest control and nearly all other facets of island life, the foreign minister said Tuesday.

Havana produced a 56-page booklet laying out its latest argument against the embargo ahead of next month’s meeting in New York of the U.N. General Assembly, which has voted 15 years in a row to urge the United States to lift trade sanctions against Cuba.

Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said the U.S. policy caused $3 billion in losses over the past year alone to the economy of Cuba — which had a 2006 GDP estimated at $40 billion, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Washington is bent on “persecuting Cuban interests and attempting to beat our people into submission with hunger and disease,” Perez Roque told a news conference.

Too late, Castro has been beating the Cuban people into submission for 40-plus years. You gotta love, though, how the MSM takes anything these communist a-holes say at face value.

Cuba watchers and some dissidents question whether RaÃºl Castro will be able to implement his reforms as long as his older brother is alive. Fidel Castro’s presence would likely deter even modest economic reforms, they said.

“In a sense, the Raulista project, if you can call it that, has been placed on hold,” said Frank Mora, a Cuba expert at the National War College in Washington, D.C.

In Cuba, Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a state-trained economist who was one of 75 dissidents arrested in a roundup of government critics in 2003, was more succinct: “RaÃºl Castro gives the impression of a man trapped inside a corset and unable to move.”